Online Fantasy Sports Betting

Fantasy sports sites give you a chance to act as an owner of a virtual sports team in a competitive environment. The goal of each game is to draft real-world players and compare the score of your team with the crews of other fantasy owners. Fantasy sports were invented in the fifties, but it was the advent of the internet that really made them popular and allowed all kinds of people to reach all the statistics necessary to determine the outcome of the games without being forced to rely on newspaper articles and printed guides.

The modern fantasy sports are based around a number of websites that attract countless sports enthusiasts from all over the world, which means that anyone who takes up this exciting hobby shouldn’t have any problems with finding other fantasy owners to play with. Even better, most fantasy sports sites allow you to compete for cash without violating any gambling laws as long as your local regulations don’t prevent you from participating in real money online skill games.

Betting Real Money

The fantasy sports games offered by early real money sites weren’t all that different from their pen and paper counterparts, as they required fantasy owners to draft teams that couldn’t altered throughout the entire season. Quite obviously, this kind of long-term approach wasn’t best suited for online play, so the entire industry quickly moved to daily draft. Consequently, the fantasy owners of today create their teams with a single day of action in mind, which allows for dynamic adjustments and doesn’t prevent you from joining the top-level competition if you make a serious mistake.

Joining a real money fantasy sports game is very similar to joining a poker tournament, as all the participants are required to pay a small fee that contributes to the overall, pre-determined prize pool and covers the operator’s costs. Those buy-ins tend to range from $0.25 for casual games to $530 for high-roller contests. Each fantasy team is scored based on the real-world performance of individual players – once the game is over, the points that were accumulated that way are used to determine the winner and payouts.

Game Types and Rules

In order to prevent all-star lineups, many real money fantasy sports games require fantasy owners to draft their teams using limited resources. The prices of players are calculated based on real-world results, which means that becoming a successful fantasy sports player requires a serious handicapping effort – in fact, the best fantasy sports enthusiasts tend to be quite proficient when it comes to traditional sports betting. Furthermore, it is worth pointing out that each fantasy discipline has a different scoring system, so it’s always a good idea to stick to what you know best.

In most cases, once you pick your fantasy sport, you’ll have several game types to choose from. If you’d like to play without a salary cap, see how far you can get in a tournament bracket or try drafting players in real-time, most major fantasy sports sites will have you covered. As you’d expect, each game type requires a slightly different approach, so most seasoned real money players tend to specialize, which allows them to maximize their profits.

Popular Fantasy Sports

Despite the fact that real money fantasy sports sites tend to attract millions of people, most operators prefer to stick to the popular disciplines and major leagues, which shouldn’t be all that surprising since obtaining accurate data for local contests could be difficult. In most cases, you’ll be able to choose between fantasy soccer, football, basketball, baseball, hockey and gold and draft players from leagues such as the MLB, NBA, NHL, CBB, CFB or NFL.

Fortunately, virtually every site allows you try all the available game modes regardless of the discipline you pick, which should be enough to keep any sports enthusiast entertained for hours regardless of the stakes that you want to compete on. In fact, it’s almost always a good idea to start with a few practice games before you actually put your hard-earned money on the line, as the competition on some of the most popular sites can get rather tough at times.

Is It Legal?

As briefly touched on above, playing fantasy sports isn’t considered gambling in most jurisdictions, which means that playing real money games should be perfectly legal for most fans. For example, the United States Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act specifically states that fantasy sports sites are allowed to offer real money games to American citizens as long as the payout structure isn’t affected by the fees and number of participants.

Since most sites abide by those regulations, there’s nothing to stop US-based fantasy owners from joining real money games. All things considered, fantasy sports enthusiasts don’t have to worry about as many regulations as online casino aficionados or poker players, which allows them to deposit and withdraw to fantasy sports sites without having to worry that the transaction will be blocked.